Paul Goldsmith buys a book in Queenstown

Two days at a literary festival in Queenstown followed by two days at a literary festival in Akaroa – literature in two kinds of South Island paradise, one surrounded by snow and wealth, built on schist and the memory of gold, the other a pretty little harbour village with two sets of colonisers, French and English, as divided as the bay which restricts boating to the left and swimming to the right. Both towns are newish to the festival circuit. It was Queenstown’s sixth, Akaroa’s second. Both are captained by brilliant and industrious women. Both set new standards in literary festival excellence.
I arrived in Queenstown on Thursday morning. Sir was put up at the Rees luxury hotel above Lake Wakatipu. The breakfast buffet included cherry tomatoes within baked beans and the wine list included a glass of something for $200. Other writers were herded into that concentration camp known as the Remarkables Park Town Centre, an 150-hectare stripmall precinct so determinedly ugly (and unpopular: a cold wind blew through its deserted canyons) that it was like a nightmare literally set in concrete. Paved paradise, put up a landscape blot. You have to try hard to get in the way of Queenstown’s spectacular beauty and the Remarkable Park Town Centre developers had tried very hard indeed. But still they failed. There is no denying the superiority of the Remarkables, “That harsh lizard-backed mountain range…Grave dinosaur dozing on”, in the lines of a visitor from Invercargill, poet Ruth Dallas. I bought her autobiography for $2 at a sale desk at the Remarkable Park Town Centre library, the first proof that art, too, can withstand the developers.
The second and greater proof was around the corner at the town centre’s lively arts hub, Te Atamira. It staged the Queenstown Writers Festival and was another, better world unto itself. I loved hanging out there and wish to thank festival trustees Chris Fitzpatrick, Debbie Jamieson, Jennifer Smart and above all trust chair Tanya Surrey, a criminal lawyer who staged the festival with imagination and sleepless energy. Bravo, too, to 23 sponsors, who included Sam Neill’s Two Paddocks Wines, Anna-Marie Chin Architects, Winestone Cheese and Patagonia Chocolates. They are all without whoms. I met a bunch of nice local residents plus caught up with dear friend and author Jane Bloomfield. Naturally I asked after her horse and she said it was Scar’s 33rd birthday that day. Happy birthday Scar!
There were sell-out workshops held by such as Harriet Allan on editing. There were sell-out author events such as Jude Dobson, who duly sold out of her book The Last Secret Agent. Patrick Gower was there – in fairness, his appearances to talk about his memoir This is the F#$%ing News should also feature the guy who actually wrote it, Eugene Bingham – and so were Airana Ngarewa, Emma Wehipeihana, Saraid de Silva, Karyn Hay, Gavin Bishop and others. I was there to talk to Mike White.
Mike has recently moved to the Central Otago quaintville of Luggate. I baked and sent him a tamarillo loaf as a housewarming. He returned the favour, bringing his own loaf to Queenstown, and I gnawed on it throughout the next four days. Mike chaired a session about my latest book The Survivors, and I kept seeing echoes of it beyond the stage; one chapter dealt with the sad case of a Chinese man who killed another Chinese man in Auckland, neither able to speak English, both of them living in squalid circumstances, working hard to save money to send back to their families, and I thought about that when I found a little book of local history at the Rees library and read a small story about a Chinese goldminer from the 1860s who lived in a shack made of flattened kerosene tins and was given a warm winter coat by a European woman but was mocked by other Chinese and returned it, saying, “Me no wantee.” A kitchenhand at the Rees was another echo of the violent crimes in The Survivors: he talked about attending the “going away party” for Renée Chignell. He meant her farewell drinks before she was jailed for the murder of Peter Plumley-Walker. I said, “And what was that like?” He said, “Remember the pub scene in Once Were Warriors? Like that except no Maoris.” But the strongest Queenstown sign of the book’s theme of lonely people trying to survive their own lives was in the shape of Kurt. Kurt is Queenstown’s one homeless person. He spends his days and nights at the Frankton public transport hub. It has a toilet block, where it’s thought he sleeps; and it has two trees next to each other, one of them a fir, and it is Kurt’s routine, Kurt’s occupation, Kurt’s destiny, to walk in circles around each tree. He has walked the ground bare. I saw him striding his eternal circuit quite a few times. He walks at a fair clip, his arms swinging. Other times I saw him resting from his labours, lying against his rucksack, his legs crossed. He is obviously mentally disturbed but just as equally true is the fact he is surviving on his wits.
Kurt walks in loops; like every other visitor to Queenstown, I walked the lakeside track of the Frankton Arm, for happy, dreamy hours, to stop and stare at lake and mountain, and to take in kowhai gold rhyming with yellow broom. Anyway, it meant I only had time to catch two events. The three greatest superstars of modern New Zealand poetry were on one stage. Tusiata Avia, Tayi Tibble and Hera Lindsay Bird were each given 15 minutes. They were fantastic. But they were joined by someone called Daren Kamali, who spoke for 30 minutes. Oh well. He seemed happy to be there.
I also attended was the opening gala, and that was politically interesting, very interesting indeed.
It was held on Friday night. Te Atamira was packed. There were guests of honour: arts minister Paul Goldsmith, National MP Joseph Mooney, and the wretched Todd Stephenson, Act’s arts spokesman whose only contribution to the arts has been to attack Tusiata Avia for her political poetry and to post a photo of himself pretending to read a book. These three representatives of the suppressive right gave the event a frisson. Goldsmith, as ever, presented himself as a blithe, raving spirit, saying nothing of any substance in his opening speech other than to say that arts funding was all very well but that Creative New Zealand was currently being tasked to look at ways for New Zealanders to engage with New Zealand arts. He symbolised this approach by announcing he had a feijoa tree at his house and loved feijoas and would henceforth buy a copy of Kate Evans’s book on feijoas. Speech finished, he did just that, and walked through the crowd to buy a copy of Feijoa. He engaged with the arts! He showed the way! Ridiculous.
There were six speakers. They were tasked to talk about love. Airana Ngarewa was wildly entertaining, but stopped to point out Goldsmith, compliment his suit, and call him “top dog”. Patrick Gower was also a crowd-pleaser, but talked at length about old mate “Goldie”. Hm. Interesting. The night wore on and Goldsmith left with Mooney before the final speaker: novelist Pip Adam. Finally, powerfully, here was someone who spoke truth to power. She said she could not talk of love at a time when the Government quite plainly hated people. It was a powerful, angry, carefully researched speech about Government policies and she attracted the loudest applause – with one dissenter. I watched Todd Stephenson for his response. When the speech finished, he turned around, looked at his partner, and rolled his eyes.
*
To beautiful Akaroa, on Saturday morning, for a completely different festival, at a completely different place with a completely different vibe. Not better; not worse; but infinitely more charming. I heard tell of a mysterious body in Akaroa known as the Ethics and Appearances Committee. They are there in part to ward off development evil. Anyone attempting to uglify it with some kind of Akaroa Park Town Centre as a medley in concrete and profit would likely be held down at high tide until they drowned. And so the town remains fixed in prettiness, little cafes and little bistros and little gift stores; and unlike Queenstown, where I had to rely on ubers and the kindness of volunteers to get from A (the venue, in Frankton) to B (the hotel, between Frankton and Queenstown) to C (Queenstown), everything was in walking distance along the pretty little shoreline. Sir stayed at the Criterion. It had a view of Banks Peninsula which was topped with snow on Sunday morning: Akaroa was so damned cold but so damned easy on the eye, where “the trees breathe/ Soft the sea-fresh air” as Ursula Bethell wrote in 1937.
The festival was created last year by former university professor turned crime novelist Marie Connolly. Her 2024 programme was marvellously inventive and was able to call on funding from the Ben Gough Family Foundation to invite, house, feed and inspire 10 Christchurch high school students whose minds were duly blown as winners of the Akaroa Writers Festival Fellowship. They were an alert bunch of Year 13s and 12s and they brought an idealism and excitement to Akaroa; bravo, then, to Akaroa young fellows Millie Morison, Brianna Searle, Milo Harrison, Ruby Love-Smith, Yaxin Zhang, Maisie Bowen, Mithali Manoj, Rebecca Saunders-Tack, Freddie Gormack-Smith, and Bugs Sullivan – hi again Bugs!
All events were held at the Gaiety Theatre, a lovely old pile dating back to 1876. It was set to be burned down as an exercise for the local fire brigade in the 1990s until three women stood up and put a stop to such nonsense; the saviours included novelist Fiona Farrell, who returned to Akaroa as a festival guest. I loved meeting her and wished we had spoken longer. The last I saw her was after she had a long talk with film maker Gaylene Preston and was still glowing at their great conversation. This is the thing about literary festivals; yes, it’s about events onstage, but equally it’s about the connections and the insights and the shared stories offstage. I met a bunch of really great local residents at the Gaiety, many of them over a cup of tea and a fine spread displayed on cake stands, provided by the parents committee from the Akaroa School. The festival bookseller was Leigh Hickey from newly established independent bookshop The Good Story – hi again Leigh!
The star attraction was novelist Catherine Chidgey. She gave one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard at a writers festival. In essence it was a kind of shopping list; she detailed a large number of disparate, random, ephemeral observations that ended up inspiring or influencing her fiction. It was dazzling to think of her seizing on these things and a larger idea forming in her mind. Such as the time she was shown the stump of an oak tree near the former Buchenwald concentration camp; Jews were used as slave labour to clear every tree to build their death camp, but were told not to cut down an oak tree that the great poet Goethe had supposedly sat beneath and composed his verses. Such as the time she read that magpies have eyes on either side of their head and can see two different things at once…Sometimes they immediately unlocked a door, sometimes she stored them away for later. I ran into her walking the Akaroa shore on Sunday. I recommended she walk the track through nearby bush to an old graveyard marked as the Dissenters Cemetery. When I saw her later that day making cups of tea alongside Fiona Farrell at the Gaiety Theatre, I asked her if she had seen or noticed anything in Akaroa that might later bear fruit, and she said: “The Dissenters Cemetery.” Hm!
There were full houses inside the dark old timber walls of the Gaiety for a talk by crime writer Michael Bennett, and for the session that immediately followed it, when I was chaired by the fabulous Jane Stafford for a session I had headlined, “Journalism and Literature: Can they stand the sight of each other?” The answer was that no, they can’t, but that I wished they would do that thing all of us only ever want of everybody and just get on. Jane was a clever and attentive chair, a real pleasure to meet, as was her partner, the splendidly hatted Mark Williams, a former enfante terrible of New Zealand literary criticism who seems very happy to have nowt to do with it anymore. What a loss, and what a shame; I shall do my best to prod him with a stick to come back to the fray. Jane made a speech the next day on Katherine Mansfield. An expert on colonial literature talking about a colonial author in a seaside town colonised by two white nations…That same weekend I read an article in e-tangata by Damien Levi (Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi) about the upcoming Verb festival in Wellington: “Our collective programming, with its notable cohort of Māori writers, feels particularly pertinent in the current political climate, where challenges to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, anti-te reo Māori sentiment, and the disestablishment of Māori-focused organisations and initiatives have become commonplace.” Yes, very pertinent; but festivals are about reaching an audience, and Jane’s talk on KM was a perfect fit for white Akaroa. I hung on every word. There was the same sense I had listening to Catherine Chidgey: that I was in the presence of genius, of that strange, unsettled mind of Katherine Mansfield.
There were workshops, a closing performance by Ariana Tikao who read a suite of poems telling a history of Banks Peninsula set to Māori wind instruments, and a slap-up dinner on Saturday night at Ma Maison. What a brilliant idea to get everyone together over a delicious meal (whole baked snapper with watercress, mushroom pâté, and Canterbury beef fillet) at a seaside restaurant. A wild storm blew across the water; it rained hard; but the noise was drowned out by laughter, chat, good spirits. Fantastic place, fantastic festival.